If Alexa, Cortana and Siri aren’t always listening, how can they pick their names out of conversations?
They are “listening”, they’re just not communicating with their home servers. The wake-up words are processed locally. I mean they have to be.
“Mute” is really a terrible way to describe this switch and breeds distrust. It should just be a WiFi switch or something.
They are “listening”, they’re just not communicating with their home servers.
Bullshit. I’m never going to buy one of those and if someone gifts one to me I’m bashing it with a hammer until it’s in pieces.
On top of what the other person said, they are always listening. Amazon has provided audio from Alexa for the police
There are actually 2 processors in the devices. 1 that constantly listens for a keyword, Al la, Alexa, Hey Google. When it hears it it quickly spins up another “computer” that then sends your voice back and forth to the servers for processing and response. It’s part of the reason that the listen word isn’t easily customized.
the makers of these things always say that, but I guarantee that long winded explanation is bullshit. Maybe there’s even hardware in there that does those things, but even so, they’re always listening, recording and submitting everything you say to their maker. Primarily for targeted ads and targeted content of other sorts…but also to snitch on you if the cops accuse you of something.
It still stores the name triggers, even incorrect matches (last I checked, which was years back).
The recordings can be played back from account history.
The one time I looked at some random, it was mostly snippets of my conversations with friends.
Creepy.
Are you actually surprised you can’t unplug a microphone from the settings menu?
How dense are you, on a scale from lead to osmium?
You’re the one that thinks an integrated microphone would just ‘turn off’ because you tapped on a touchscreen so maybe cool it with the schoolyard insults you tossed some elemental chemistry into to make yourself sound smarter.
Showing me a picture of a hardware switch when my point was about software settings is pointless.
Yes, but you are the one who started to talk about a software switch. So obviously you were not aware of the fact that there are hardware switches. Or you just wanted to troll.
Pretty sure I was talking about the subject of the post and not, as many have pointed out, all the ways you could possibly wire up a fucking microphone.
This is why we don’t have such devices
You don´t have a phone?
When I turn my phone’s microphone off and say “hey Google” my phone doesn’t respond in the slightest. Much more comforting.
If you really think your phone not responding means your phone is not listening …
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Interesting, thank you!
I didn’t say that, I said it’s more comforting. Unfortunately I need my phone for work so I can’t run a de-googled rom so it’s good enough for me. And I never see ads referencing things I talk about.
I don’t understand, how does running a degoogled rom stop you from using the phone for work?
I also use my phone for work (company profile, apps, 2fa etc) and it works fine on GrapheneOS.
There are 2 apps I use that won’t work on graphine. I’ve been trying on my second phone and I can’t make it work.
It doesn’t run anything from google. I run lineage os.
You could make the point that the service companies know where you ate all the time but that doesn’t have anything to do with audio that I know of.
I thought lineage os still uses google for stuff like push notifications? It just doesn’t use the “Google apps” by default
It does not. It is fairly close to AOSP with a few improvements to the stock system.
You can choose to install gapps or not.
I run lineage os
Good for you, never mind then. However, most people run preinstalled OS, so I just assumed you also would.
Honestly if you are thinking about your phone listening to you then you probably should look into running something other than stock. (You are not most people)
Good point. How complicated is it to install lineage OS on a Fairphone while also keeping/transferring my contacts?
It depends. What I would do if you are interested is buy a cheap damaged phone that is still usable and then flash it with Lineage. From there you can break things without causing issues on your main device.
The amount of amazon > google grift in the comments as if they’re not both spying on you is so cute :)
These threads are always full of fucking bootlickers and paid shills.
And also full of people unironically using the term bootlickers
Plenty of unironic bootlickers out there, no?
Plenty of people unironically using it believing it’s an actual argument
It wasn’t meant to be ironic.
That’s what the other poster just said, unironic.
Yes that’s what I said. You unironically using it. Cringe.
Either way your response is useless.
And yours wasn’t? Man, the least you could be is self aware
Lol people like you amaze me.
Overlaps between people who say “bootlicker” and people who can’t read? I’m shocked
personally I think its better to be afraid of real things that are happening than things made up by Facebook boomers.
why this particular issue fools even the most technical of people I’ll never know.
What made up by Facebook boomers, that devices can be used to listen and collect data on users?
obviously what you vaguely describe has been around since 1945.
That home assistant devices are constantly listening and feeding back marketing data on every conversation is patent and disproven nonsense.
they have done packet sniffing investigations, they have disassembled the devices, they have run meters on the electrical charges… everything in every way you can imagine.
But even if you just think about it for a second - processing a live audio feed at a rate of 1 second per second indefinitely and correlating that data via voice recognition to your Google profile all to… make your ad personalizations… worse? more inaccurate?
like what the hell is the perceived benefit? That my wife says, “oh my dad found my old barbie house!” while at my neighbors house and my neighbor gets served barbie ads? Why would Google want that?
LOL :)
But Facebook can’t spy on me, I repost the “I DO NOT GIVE FACEBOOK PERMISSION” spam every 3 months without fail!
Sound’s like it’s just not sending the data back to Daddy Google. The OK Google/Alexa bit is done on a custom chip on the device. Clearly that bit isn’t being turned off, but anything after that isn’t being sent anywhere.
Probably just saves support calls this way from idiots who turn it off and forget.
“Probably” is a great way to protect your privacy haha
only if phones can be like thinkpads which you can easily remove say the audio card from its motherboard.
Then how would you use it as a phone?
I’d love a “phone” that was just a mobile internet-connected device. I very rarely use it as an actual phone, primarily just for text, email, and web browsing.
So…a Palm Pilot?
Yeah but minus the game boy screen and the stylus
If this is a normal Android app, the solution to this is simply to disable the Google app. pretty sure all the voice related shit and google lens and all that crap is tied to the Google app.
if its a closed source googled rom, then you have no way of knowing.
So, I don’t trust them to have actually done what I’m going to describe, (and honestly I’ve just accepted that even with everything off, they’re still giving me ads based on stuff I’ve only talked about and never clicked or written anything), but:
The programs that recognize specific phrases(Ok Google), are always separate from normal voice recognition (and much much lighter in terms of processing). So, if they weren’t Google, they might have left the “Ok Google” recognition on, but not process anything else that the mic receives.
They’re probably still listening in though.
They’re probably still listening in though.
Maybe? But also I’ve never seen any evidence of them listening with the mic off or without you saying the “wake word”.
What you describe is actually how it works. If they actually sent all you say to their servers, it would be trivial to detect with a network analyser.
And if they were found to be sending it all the time, holy fuck the fines would end the company.
Why listen and risk even a slap on the wrist?
As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.
One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August.
Not necessarily you or your case, but I’m still convinced that a lot of people just have confirmation bias (only noticing it when it happens and discounting the thousands of otherwise innocent ads). There’s also subconscious ad effects, like you were only talking about it to begin with because your saw it somewhere because it’s been spreading by weird of mouth from people who initially saw an ad
Doesn’t really explain why I was receiving cat litter ads after only speaking with my husband offhand about maybe getting a cat. We didn’t already have a cat, so hadn’t had any reason to look up any cat care goods ever, and I had never searched for anything even remotely cat-related up to that point. But wouldn’t you know it, about 45 minutes later, I was getting kitty litter ads. Very spooky.
Sorry but I want the true story to be that your husband immediately went off and started googling to find a cat to surprise you for Christmas thus you got cat ads (same network like someone else said).
Lmao, I wish but no, no hallmark movie plots here. This was a few years ago, and we now have said cat :) He definitely forgot immediately after I mentioned it until I showed up with a cat one day lol
Voice assistants are money losing products. If they can do something like processing the wakewords on the device before chosing to send to a server they will. These companies are far too stingy to continuously stream audio to their servers
I think this should be fairly easy to test yourself. Just disconnect from the WAN, say the wake word, and see if the device responds.
He means internet, people. He means disconnect from the internet
Also, why isn’t there a slide cover to physically cover the camera, and why can’t I turn off the mic and camera separately? So I just use one of those black foam stickers to cover the camera.
My Lenovo smart display has one and I have never opened it because I don’t need to make video calls with a smart display
